Optima brochure – Cooper & Beatty, Tony Mann, 1963

Ancient Roman monumental lettering often used triangular shaped dots instead of word spacing. They also broke words whenever it suited the design. It wasn’t until the development of moveable type that rules regarding line breaks and word spacing were instituted.

With the possible exception of American type designer F. W. Goudy, few art directors in 1963 would have even heard the name of a type designer let alone seen a photograph. But Hermann Zapf had gained international recognition for his superb calligraphy, remarkable type design and sensitive typography.

A photograph of the incised lettering on the Trajan column would have instantly conveyed the deep roots of Optima. Cooper & Beatty was one of the few, and often the first, type shop who tried to tell the stories behind the typefaces in their library.

Designers needed to be able to visualize how their project would look when set in a particular typeface. A good specimen tried to show all the weights and italics of the typeface in use, even if only in a few short paragraphs.

Optima played an important role in the early days of digital type. Its shallow, concave strokes, were especially difficult to capture in early bitmaps. Typesetting machine manufacturers would use Optima to demonstrate how good their image setters were at rendering those kinds of complex strokes.

In an era when designers did not have direct access to typefaces, it was especially important that they have good specimens that allowed them to see a typeface in a wide range of sizes. Designers relied heavily on such specimens, often tracing the letters on tissue paper to see how the specific words would look in that typeface.

Notes

A carefully designed brochure for Hermann Zapf’s Optima typeface. It was created in early 1963 when Tony Mann was just starting work on the new Cooper & Beatty visual identity program. The moss green may have been one of the trial colours he used before settling on the vivid orange that would become so closely associate with C&B. The company used a similar green, as well as a matching blue, for different divisions, but they don’t appear to have been applied consistently. This particular copy had been sent to Mono Lino and is date stamped Jun 4 1963. It was customary to stamp the date received on most incoming mail.

Mann’s brochure demonstrates that Optima can serve as both a striking monumental display type and a fine text face. Zapf’s original name for Optima was New Antique. The Roman letterform is older than the German Blackletter so in Germany roman typefaces are called Antiqua, which in English can often lead to apparently irresistible word plays such as ‘a new antique’. A sans serif design based on the classic roman letterform, which was always serifed, made Optima a radical design when first released and many graphic designers did not like it. However it quickly became one of the most popular typefaces in the Western world and is now considered a classic. – Rod McDonald

Category
Advertising and Promotion
Title
Optima A New Antique
Date
1963
Client
Cooper & Beatty, Limited
Credits
Design: Anthony (Tony) Mann (1927–2013)
Principal Typefaces
Optima (Linotype), Monotype Grotesque 215
Description
Two-colour brochure, 6pp
Size: 8.5 × 11 inches
Region
Ontario
Languages
English
Number of images
6
Holding
Canadian Typography Archives
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Optima brochure – Cooper & Beatty, Tony Mann, 1963

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